This World, This Life

  This a re-post from last year.  The sentiments are unchanged and always will be, but I've updated it to take account of the passage of time and the Pandemic. Forget Hallowe'en.   Despite all the trick or treating, crazy costumes and horror movies on the telly, here in Poland it's no more than a sideshow.  Thankfully the American obsession with it hasn't reached us, at least not to the same extent.  Indeed, the Catholic Church here, whose priests and nuns provide religious instruction in schools, in a country where First Communion and Confirmation are taken much more seriously than in many places (certainly than back home in Britain) openly and happily denounce Hallowe'en as being Evil, and encourage parents to ignore it and punish kids who join in the fun.  Mind you, they say likewise about the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas.  Which says a lot about the the shape of things here right now..... No, the big day here is the next day, November 1st...

  So the whistle-blower has now testified before Congress and the British Parliament and held firm to her story, despite Facebook's attempts to discredit both her and her testimony.  This should be no surprise to anyone who has followed the story, or indeed the growth and decline of the platform.  Sure, it has billions of users, but the service it now provides and the way it works has changed very much for the worse. I've had enough.  I'm off. ------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Zuckerberg created the platform and founded the company when he was a spotty teenage undergrad at Uni - he never did complete his degree.  It was all very altruistic: a way to maintain contact with friends and relatives, have a bit of fun, organise dorm parties, exchange bright ideas and unused stuff no longer wanted, and have a good old on-line natter.  It worked, so well that it quickly outgrew its home Uni base and spread to other college faculties a...

  Finally!   After several months of stop - start planning, largely down to the prohibitive costs and restrictions BoJo's amateur Government chose to apply to travellers to and from the UK, I managed to get back to my homeland after almost exactly 2 years.  Getting to see my grandkids, especially the lad born last year during Lockdown, and visiting my ailing elderly sisters has been a target since early this year, when restrictions began lifting, but it's taken much grief, stress and expense to finally achieve it. And how was it? In a word....interesting. ------------------------------------------------------------ I'm fully inoculated, as is my wife and my daughter who accompanied me to England.  We have our EU Covid passport documents.  Last month, I visited Switzerland for a couple of weeks, solo, and it was a painless travel experience, no different from a pre-Pandemic Schengen hop.  The only extra document I needed to complete was the online Swiss...